FIDE World Cup, Preliminary Round

So, even though the Carlsen-Nepomniachtchi match hasn't started yet, the qualification process to determine who will be in the next World Championship match is already under way. Joining the loser of that match and Radjabov (who withdrew from the last Candidates for COVID-related reasons) in the Candidates will be two players from the World Cup, two from the Grand Swiss, and two from the Grand Prix. 

  The  World Cup is, this time around, increased to 206 participants from its previous 128, with the top 50 seeds going straight into the round of 128 and the other 156 playing in a preliminary round. Apart from that change, the format is the same as in previous years: a seeded knockout with two-game mini-matches; matches that finish 1-1 go on to tie-break matches at progressively faster time controls. At the end of it, the two finalists are the qualifiers, and all the quarter-finalists who don't reach the final qualify for the Grand Prix.

Or, at least, that's what would happen in normal circumstances. However, normal circumstances are slightly interrupted by the fact that Magnus Carlsen has decided to enter the World Cup. Why he's decided to enter a tournament whose main purpose is to serve as a qualifier for an event he's already qualified for is up to him, but it will mean that if he reaches the final, the two qualifiers will be his opponent in the final and the winner of the third-place playoff.

Carlsen's presence, as top seed, has some interesting knock-on effects: it puts the two players who would otherwise be the top two seeds, Caruana and Aronian, into the same half of the draw, and it similarly puts the player who would otherwise be 8th seed, Dominguez, into a collision course with the now 8th seed Firoujza for a place in the all-important quarter-finals. I'm not convinced that having Carlsen in your tournament is worth this sort of competitive disruption, but hey ho.

So what about the chess itself? Well, most of the preliminary round pairings have gone with seeding, but not all: British interest in the event has been maintained by our sole representative, Ravi Haria (England, seed 169), getting through in the tie-break games against Vadim Zvjaginsev (Russia, seed 88). He now goes on to play seed 41, Etienne Bacrot of France. The other successful giant-killers were Jahongir Vakhidov of Uzbekistan, Juraj Druska of Slovakia, Panneerselvam Iniyan of India, Guillermo Vasquez of Paraguay, Abdelrahman Hesham of Egypt, Volodar Murzin of Russia, Shamsiddin Vokhidov of Uzbekistan and Vojtěch Plát of the Czech Republic.

 




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Great Players: Ignatz von Kolisch

Image
I first referenced this video in the piece about Alexander Petrov , but it bears another look: You will notice that  Paul Morphy was dominant throughout his entire competitive career, but his reign as world #1 was interrupted briefly by a player called Kolisch, who then almost immediately disappears from the scene. So this piqued my interest: who was this mysterious Kolisch, and why is his name so much less familiar than those of his contemporaries? Well, the answer, on looking at his  Wikipedia article , seems to be that he just had a very short playing career, and did not play much against the big names of his day. This is backed up by his chessgames page , which shows nearly all his games coming in the years 1857-1867. This did, however, include two triumphs in international tournaments. One was the relatively weak Cambridge 1860 event, but the other was the rather stronger  Paris 1867 event, which would also star future world champion Steinitz. This tournament ef...
Read more

West is Best at the 4NCL, Rounds 1-2, 22-23 October 2022

 The 4NCL , Britain's only professional chess league, has, like many chess events, been disrupted by the ongoing pandemic. The 2019-20 season was aborted six rounds in; there was no 2020-21 season, and the 2021-22 season was an experimental format for that season only: a Swiss system (chosen so that if it needed to terminate early, the final finishing positions would still be reasonable ones). The twelve teams who finished at the top of the Swiss that year would be in Division 1 in the new 2022-23 season, and my team, West Is Best, were one of the lucky twelve. This was naturally always going to be a tricky season to negotiate, and the way the draw was done meant we could expect a rocky start: the top six finishers of the previous season were paired to face the teams finishing 7th-12th in the first six rounds of the season, thus maximizing the chances of exciting promotion and relegation clashes occurring towards the end. Thus, arriving at the Daventry Court Hotel on the Saturday,...
Read more

4NCL Congress, 9-11 July 2021

 So it turns out congress chess has started to make a return, in the shape of the long-running series of 4NCL Congresses . The 25th such event was held in Leamington Spa over the past weekend, and attracted a total entry of 130 entrants across 3 sections. Among the entrants were three grandmasters, Nigel Davies, Keith Arkell and Peter Wells, but none of those players actually won the Open section. First place was instead shared by two strong young players, FM Jonah Willow (19) and CM Aaravamudhan Balaji (16), with 4½/5. Balaji's performance was especially impressive, including a win against Wells and a draw against Arkell on his way to a rating gain of 67.2 points. Arkell finished third on 4 points. I've annotated three of the games; thank you to Jonathan Tait for giving help on how to display them.
Read more